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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see such a sensor for photos instead of video!

I think it's possible you might be unfamiliar with just how sensitive current sensors are, for photographic use? You can easily capture these kinds of images in very high resolution with a very affordable DSLR body today. The trick is capturing them at only 1080P or 2K, over and over, 24 to 60 times a second, consistently. That's what would be a game changer.

of course we would, but photographers wouldn't be too impressed with only capturing 1920(?)x1080 resolution.

This gains it's light gathering abilities by simply having much larger "pixels" on the sensor, which can collect more photons. This is the same principal used on the highest end canon eos body, the 1DX, which has slightly lower resolution than the 5DmkIII in order to gain sensitivity.

Native resolution of this baby looks to be 864 mm^2 / 19 micron^2 ~= 45MPix, in line with the latest Nikon and with rumors of high-density FF Canon. The innovation here is noise reduction and not the sensor itself... obviously Canon will charge an arm an a leg for that video camera - and won't ever make it into a DSLR to not cannibalize their profits.

I'm fairly certain they meant that pixels are 19µm on a side, not in area, since they state:

> 7.5-times the surface area of the pixels on the CMOS sensor incorporated in Canon's top-of-the-line EOS-1D X and other digital SLR cameras

That puts a 35mm sensor right around HD video resolution, or in the 2-2.1MP range.

This same sentence also says:

>The newly developed CMOS sensor features pixels measuring 19 microns square in size

So there is a possibility that the pixels are merged by the image processor after data is read off the sensor.

I, at least, read "19 microns square" as "19 microns times 19 microns", that is, (19 µm)² = 361 µm².

suddenly everything started to make sense...

Why do you say that? Their SLR line already has video cameras in its lineup. It's actually becoming a pretty big thing to use an SLR for a video camera instead of a regular video camera. If that lens was put inside their next EOS 1D or 5D, you'd better believe there'd be a considerable line of people wanting this camera, especially if you could shoot in 1080p or higher, as well as 45MP (or even mid-30's).

Cannibalizing? Not even close. Just the next generation of cameras! They did the same thing between the ... I think it was EOS 50D and EOS 60D

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